Baltimore mother who killed her children found not criminally responsible – Baltimore Sun

A Baltimore prosecutor was stunned when a report by state psychiatrists on the mental state of a mother who killed her two young children in 2021 appeared to ignore the woman’s bizarre behavior that led to the children’s deaths.

The Maryland Department of Health medical examiner’s office concluded that Jameria Hall set fire to her home with a blowtorch to destroy evidence of her children’s deaths. This suggests that she knew it was wrong to kill her children and was therefore of sound mind at the time, prosecutor Tracy Varda said in court.

But doctors’ conclusions ignored a brush found in a pan on the stove, Varda said. Hall told investigators she cut the children’s hair because she thought it would “give them control” and put the hair and brush in the pan to “break the spell” she believed relatives had placed on her children.

This was one of what Varda described as several questionable interpretations of the evidence surrounding the gruesome August 2021 killings by state psychiatrists. These led the prosecution to hire an expert to evaluate the work of the state psychiatrists and ultimately support the defense’s position: Hall was suffering from a mental disorder at the time and should be declared not criminally responsible due to insanity.

Hall, 31, pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and child abuse resulting in the deaths of 6-year-old Da’Neria Thomas and 8-year-old Davin Thomas. A judge found Hall not criminally responsible at the same hearing in April and ordered her indefinite commitment to the Department of Health.

Retired Judge Gale E. Rasin, who presides over the Baltimore Circuit Court’s Mental Health Court program, said Hall suffered from schizoaffective disorder of the depressive type – a thought, delusion and mood disorder – and concluded that she “lacked the essential ability to recognize the criminality of her conduct and … to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law.”

People who are committed to the health department’s care for violent crimes go to the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup, the state’s maximum-security psychiatric facility. Doctors could eventually recommend Hall a “conditional release” based on successful treatment, but that decision would be up to a judge and prosecutors would have a chance to voice their opinion.

“No one can tell you today when, if ever, a recommendation for your conditional release will be made,” Rasin told Hall before asking her if she understood.

“Yes,” Hall replied.

“Mommy, no!”

Nearly three years ago, homicide investigators were called to a gruesome crime scene in southwest Baltimore.

A maintenance worker who was asked to investigate a foul odor entered an apartment on Aug. 24, 2021, and found the decomposing bodies of two children, charging documents state. Davin was found in a sleeping bag, with a knife still embedded in his chest and a black trash bag over his head. Da’Neria was found in the bathtub, with a piece of clothing wrapped around her neck.

Neighbors recalled hearing children screaming, “Mommy, no!” about five days before their bodies were found.

Less than a day later, police charged Hall. In the charging documents, investigators wrote that she confessed during an interview with the homicide squad.

In the days that followed, warning signs emerged that suggested the woman was struggling with mental illness.

About three years before she killed her children, Hall turned her parents’ gas oven up to the highest heat, lit the burners, assembled a shrine of family photographs, and burned their house to the ground. She pleaded guilty to arson and was sentenced to a year in prison.

It wasn’t long before she was raising her children again.

In four episodes of the podcast “BMoreE Charming,” which Hall recorded, she talked about trying to launch a T-shirt and cosmetics line, reading a bedtime book to her children and explaining the arson case as her “nervous breakdown.” Hall also spoke about her struggle with mental illness.

“My anger triggers my anxiety; my anxiety triggers my stress; my stress triggers my depression,” she said. “I get depressed when I just can’t control the stress.”

At Hall’s April 17 hearing, held via Zoom, most details to date about her struggles leading up to the children’s murders came to light.

Her boyfriend told investigators he noticed a change in Hall’s behavior about a week before the murders, Varda said.

“She told him she believed her family was planning to kill her,” the prosecutor said.

The last time her boyfriend saw Hall before the murders, she ordered him into the trunk of her car and drove him around for hours, Varda said. At one point, she locked him in a storage cell.

State psychiatrists attributed the behavior to anger issues. They also said Hall had a financial motive for the murder.

A spokesman for the Department of Health declined to comment on Hall’s case, but said in a statement that the department “is already prepared to cooperate with the courts and provide medically appropriate and timely responses to psychiatric examinations.”

“I heard voices”

Mary Pizzo, one of Hall’s attorneys who headed the public defender’s forensic psychiatry division for 11 years before recently retiring, called it “unusual” for the prosecution to contradict a report by health department doctors.

Varda was disturbed by the doctors’ conclusions and did not give up.

The prosecutor said she had seen Hall’s police interview in the arson case, subpoenaed records from the hospital where Hall was taken after the murders, reviewed Hall’s arrest records, listened to phone calls Hall made from prison to her incarcerated brother before the murders and examined Hall’s Facebook page, which showed pictures of “happy, cared for children.”

“Which, in my opinion, made no sense compared to what was in the report,” Varda said.

In a phone call from prison after Hall’s arrest, she described suffering from hallucinations when she stopped taking medication.

“I heard voices that thought the children were really different people,” Hall said. “It was crazy.”

The phone calls between Hall and her incarcerated brother in the two weeks before the murders were revealing to an expert hired by prosecutors to review the report from health department doctors. Varda said the prosecutors’ expert concluded that the phone calls showed Hall was suffering from psychosis.

A phone call suggested a dark foreboding.

“She said, ‘This is a life-or-death situation. I have to act because I have to save us,'” Varda quoted the call as saying.

In another description, Hall described her son as “the storm” and her daughter as “the rainbow child.”

“I talked to Mom about ghost stuff,” Varda recalled Hall saying in a phone call. “Then she just talks nonsense. Then she talks about love and finding her final destination.”

“It’s just heartbreaking”

Hall appeared in court via video from the Maryland Correctional Institution – Women in Jessup. She hung her head for most of the hearing and became emotional at times. Pizzo put her arm around Hall. When Davin’s love of the Ninja Turtles cartoon came up, Hall burst into tears.

Relatives expressed dismay at the outcome of Hall’s case.

“When you hear all of the testimony from the prosecutor and the doctors, some of it is untrue,” the children’s grandmother, Jennifer Jordan, said in court. “It’s just heartbreaking.”

The children’s father, Devin Thomas, didn’t have much to add.

“Imagine losing your children to your partner or whoever – the person who said they loved them,” Thomas said.

However, the hearing mainly focused on the contradictory findings of the doctors.

“Nothing a psychiatrist can say and nothing I can say today can ease this horror and pain and your suffering,” Rasin said. “The intention behind all this information was exactly that: to give you information.”

While the health department doctors found Hall criminally responsible, a forensic psychiatrist hired by the defense came to the opposite conclusion. Only the defense doctor’s report was admitted as evidence at the hearing.

Before declaring Hall not criminally responsible, Razin praised Varda for the “extraordinary investigation” into Hall’s mental health.

“I have never seen anything like this. That a prosecutor goes so far and examines every single piece of evidence available, be it calls from prison or interrogations, and finally calls in her own expert, which does not happen very often,” Rasin said.

Hall’s other attorney, public defender Deborah Levi, called the case “incredibly serious and tragic.” She said the defense was “grateful that the state and the court have recognized the serious mental illness underlying this tragedy.”

The judge did not mince his words when he commented on the work of the health department doctors, who accused him that Hall was malingering or faking symptoms.

However, Hall was previously declared incompetent to stand trial and sent to Perkins for treatment to restore her ability to defend herself. She spent about a year there under the care of psychiatrists and other psychologists who diagnosed her with schizoaffective disorder.

Varda and Rasin said the health department’s forensic pathologists ignored the observations and diagnoses of their treatment team.

“I honestly don’t understand how (the doctors) could come to this conclusion by emphasizing and exaggerating certain facts,” Rasin said.